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On late-night television, it was once understood that David Letterman was beloved by coastal liberals and Jay Leno more of a Middle American taste. But neither man was prone to delivering hectoring monologues in the style of the “Daily Show” alums who now dominate late night. Fallon’s apolitical shtick increasingly makes him an outlier among his peers, many of whom are less comics than propagandists — liberal “explanatory journalists” with laugh lines.

Some of them have better lines than others, and some joke more or hector less. But to flip from Stephen Colbert’s winsome liberalism to Seth Meyers’s class-clown liberalism to Bee’s bluestocking feminism to John Oliver’s and Trevor Noah’s lectures on American benightedness is to enter an echo chamber from which the imagination struggles to escape.

It isn’t just late-night TV. Cultural arenas and institutions that were always liberal are being prodded or dragged further to the left. Awards shows are being pushed to shed their genteel limousine liberalism and embrace the race-gender-sexual identity agenda in full. Colleges and universities are increasingly acting as indoctrinators for that same agenda, shifting their already-lefty consensus under activist pressure.

Meanwhile, institutions that were seen as outside or sideways to political debate have been enlisted in the culture war. The tabloid industry gave us the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner, and ESPN gave her its Arthur Ashe Award. The N.B.A., N.C.A.A. and the A.C.C. — nobody’s idea of progressive forces, usually — are acting as enforcers on behalf of gay and transgender rights. Jock culture remains relatively reactionary, but even the N.F.L. is having its Black Lives Matters moment, thanks to Colin Kaepernick.

For the left, these are clear signs of cultural gains, cultural victory. But the scale and swiftness of those victories have created two distinctive political problems for the Democratic Party.

First, within the liberal tent, they have dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic. Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.

Thus Clinton’s peculiar predicament. She has moved further left than any modern Democratic nominee, and absorbed the newer left’s Manichaean view of the culture war sufficiently that she finds herself dismissing almost a quarter of the electorate as “irredeemable” before her donors. Yet she still finds herself battling an insurgency on her left flank, and somewhat desperately pitching millennials on her ideological bona fides.

At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s government.

This spirit of political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trump’s act. As James Parker wrote in The Atlantic, he’s occupying “a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.” (The alt-right-ish columnist Steve Sailer made the punk rock analogy as well.) Like the Sex Pistols, Parker suggests, Trump is out to “upend the culture” — but in this case it’s the culture of institutionalized political correctness and John Oliver explaining the news to you, forever.

On late-night television, it was once understood that David Letterman was beloved by coastal liberals and Jay Leno more of a Middle American taste. But neither man was prone to delivering hectoring monologues in the style of the “Daily Show” alums who now dominate late night. Fallon’s apolitical shtick increasingly makes him an outlier among his peers, many of whom are less comics than propagandists — liberal “explanatory journalists” with laugh lines.

Some of them have better lines than others, and some joke more or hector less. But to flip from Stephen Colbert’s winsome liberalism to Seth Meyers’s class-clown liberalism to Bee’s bluestocking feminism to John Oliver’s and Trevor Noah’s lectures on American benightedness is to enter an echo chamber from which the imagination struggles to escape.

It isn’t just late-night TV. Cultural arenas and institutions that were always liberal are being prodded or dragged further to the left. Awards shows are being pushed to shed their genteel limousine liberalism and embrace the race-gender-sexual identity agenda in full. Colleges and universities are increasingly acting as indoctrinators for that same agenda, shifting their already-lefty consensus under activist pressure.

Meanwhile, institutions that were seen as outside or sideways to political debate have been enlisted in the culture war. The tabloid industry gave us the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner, and ESPN gave her its Arthur Ashe Award. The N.B.A., N.C.A.A. and the A.C.C. — nobody’s idea of progressive forces, usually — are acting as enforcers on behalf of gay and transgender rights. Jock culture remains relatively reactionary, but even the N.F.L. is having its Black Lives Matters moment, thanks to Colin Kaepernick.

For the left, these are clear signs of cultural gains, cultural victory. But the scale and swiftness of those victories have created two distinctive political problems for the Democratic Party.

First, within the liberal tent, they have dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic. Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.

Thus Clinton’s peculiar predicament. She has moved further left than any modern Democratic nominee, and absorbed the newer left’s Manichaean view of the culture war sufficiently that she finds herself dismissing almost a quarter of the electorate as “irredeemable” before her donors. Yet she still finds herself battling an insurgency on her left flank, and somewhat desperately pitching millennials on her ideological bona fides.

At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s government.

This spirit of political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trump’s act. As James Parker wrote in The Atlantic, he’s occupying “a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.” (The alt-right-ish columnist Steve Sailer made the punk rock analogy as well.) Like the Sex Pistols, Parker suggests, Trump is out to “upend the culture” — but in this case it’s the culture of institutionalized political correctness and John Oliver explaining the news to you, forever.

On late-night television, it was once understood that David Letterman was beloved by coastal liberals and Jay Leno more of a Middle American taste. But neither man was prone to delivering hectoring monologues in the style of the “Daily Show” alums who now dominate late night. Fallon’s apolitical shtick increasingly makes him an outlier among his peers, many of whom are less comics than propagandists — liberal “explanatory journalists” with laugh lines.

Some of them have better lines than others, and some joke more or hector less. But to flip from Stephen Colbert’s winsome liberalism to Seth Meyers’s class-clown liberalism to Bee’s bluestocking feminism to John Oliver’s and Trevor Noah’s lectures on American benightedness is to enter an echo chamber from which the imagination struggles to escape.

It isn’t just late-night TV. Cultural arenas and institutions that were always liberal are being prodded or dragged further to the left. Awards shows are being pushed to shed their genteel limousine liberalism and embrace the race-gender-sexual identity agenda in full. Colleges and universities are increasingly acting as indoctrinators for that same agenda, shifting their already-lefty consensus under activist pressure.

Meanwhile, institutions that were seen as outside or sideways to political debate have been enlisted in the culture war. The tabloid industry gave us the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner, and ESPN gave her its Arthur Ashe Award. The N.B.A., N.C.A.A. and the A.C.C. — nobody’s idea of progressive forces, usually — are acting as enforcers on behalf of gay and transgender rights. Jock culture remains relatively reactionary, but even the N.F.L. is having its Black Lives Matters moment, thanks to Colin Kaepernick.

For the left, these are clear signs of cultural gains, cultural victory. But the scale and swiftness of those victories have created two distinctive political problems for the Democratic Party.

First, within the liberal tent, they have dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic. Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.

Thus Clinton’s peculiar predicament. She has moved further left than any modern Democratic nominee, and absorbed the newer left’s Manichaean view of the culture war sufficiently that she finds herself dismissing almost a quarter of the electorate as “irredeemable” before her donors. Yet she still finds herself battling an insurgency on her left flank, and somewhat desperately pitching millennials on her ideological bona fides.

At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s government.

This spirit of political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trump’s act. As James Parker wrote in The Atlantic, he’s occupying “a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.” (The alt-right-ish columnist Steve Sailer made the punk rock analogy as well.) Like the Sex Pistols, Parker suggests, Trump is out to “upend the culture” — but in this case it’s the culture of institutionalized political correctness and John Oliver explaining the news to you, forever.

So, you're planning on voting for Trump, then?

As he's said over and over, he's definitely not voting for Trump. And he's an honorable man.

On late-night television, it was once understood that David Letterman was beloved by coastal liberals and Jay Leno more of a Middle American taste. But neither man was prone to delivering hectoring monologues in the style of the “Daily Show” alums who now dominate late night. Fallon’s apolitical shtick increasingly makes him an outlier among his peers, many of whom are less comics than propagandists — liberal “explanatory journalists” with laugh lines.

Some of them have better lines than others, and some joke more or hector less. But to flip from Stephen Colbert’s winsome liberalism to Seth Meyers’s class-clown liberalism to Bee’s bluestocking feminism to John Oliver’s and Trevor Noah’s lectures on American benightedness is to enter an echo chamber from which the imagination struggles to escape.

It isn’t just late-night TV. Cultural arenas and institutions that were always liberal are being prodded or dragged further to the left. Awards shows are being pushed to shed their genteel limousine liberalism and embrace the race-gender-sexual identity agenda in full. Colleges and universities are increasingly acting as indoctrinators for that same agenda, shifting their already-lefty consensus under activist pressure.

Meanwhile, institutions that were seen as outside or sideways to political debate have been enlisted in the culture war. The tabloid industry gave us the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner, and ESPN gave her its Arthur Ashe Award. The N.B.A., N.C.A.A. and the A.C.C. — nobody’s idea of progressive forces, usually — are acting as enforcers on behalf of gay and transgender rights. Jock culture remains relatively reactionary, but even the N.F.L. is having its Black Lives Matters moment, thanks to Colin Kaepernick.

For the left, these are clear signs of cultural gains, cultural victory. But the scale and swiftness of those victories have created two distinctive political problems for the Democratic Party.

First, within the liberal tent, they have dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic. Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.

Thus Clinton’s peculiar predicament. She has moved further left than any modern Democratic nominee, and absorbed the newer left’s Manichaean view of the culture war sufficiently that she finds herself dismissing almost a quarter of the electorate as “irredeemable” before her donors. Yet she still finds herself battling an insurgency on her left flank, and somewhat desperately pitching millennials on her ideological bona fides.

At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s government.

This spirit of political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trump’s act. As James Parker wrote in The Atlantic, he’s occupying “a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.” (The alt-right-ish columnist Steve Sailer made the punk rock analogy as well.) Like the Sex Pistols, Parker suggests, Trump is out to “upend the culture” — but in this case it’s the culture of institutionalized political correctness and John Oliver explaining the news to you, forever.

So, you're planning on voting for Trump, then?

As he's said over and over, he's definitely not voting for Trump. And he's an honorable man.

Not sure if you're serious or not, but I'm going to go ahead and ask that question every time he defends trump and demonizes Hillary at every opportunity. As someone who despises both Trump and Hillary, I'm not going to let him go never trump, then silently slink off and vote for Trump anyway, which is what his actions scream, in spite of other claims, to anyone who is paying attention.

Maybe he's playing some sort of mental contortionist game, where he won't personally vote for trump, but will do everything in his power to make sure to maximize the number of people who do and minimize the number of people who vote for Hillary as if that's any different.

Yep, I am a girl Scientist. Come for the breasts; Stay for the brains!

For as long as I shall live I will testify to love; I'll be a witness in the silences when words are not enough.

ejmowrer wrote:

Not sure if you're serious or not, but I'm going to go ahead and ask that question every time he defends trump and demonizes Hillary at every opportunity. As someone who despises both Trump and Hillary, I'm not going to let him go never trump, then silently slink off and vote for Trump anyway, which is what his actions scream, in spite of other claims, to anyone who is paying attention.

Maybe he's playing some sort of mental contortionist game, where he won't personally vote for trump, but will do everything in his power to make sure to maximize the number of people who do and minimize the number of people who vote for Hillary as if that's any different.

I think you are being a bit unfair here. This is a very slanted forum. I can see the value in making sure the crappy stuff from both sides is being shed light on.

Plenty of people are trashing Trump only in here already. So if all Drew wants to do is inject some balance and remind us that both options are shitty, that is not anything like endorsing Trump or working for a Trump win.

I cannot see into his heart and know that is his only goal but that is what his efforts have looked like to me.

Not sure if you're serious or not, but I'm going to go ahead and ask that question every time he defends trump and demonizes Hillary at every opportunity. As someone who despises both Trump and Hillary, I'm not going to let him go never trump, then silently slink off and vote for Trump anyway, which is what his actions scream, in spite of other claims, to anyone who is paying attention.

Maybe he's playing some sort of mental contortionist game, where he won't personally vote for trump, but will do everything in his power to make sure to maximize the number of people who do and minimize the number of people who vote for Hillary as if that's any different.

I think you are being a bit unfair here. This is a very slanted forum. I can see the value in making sure the crappy stuff from both sides is being shed light on.

Plenty of people are trashing Trump only in here already. So if all Drew wants to do is inject some balance and remind us that both options are shitty, that is not anything like endorsing Trump or working for a Trump win.

I cannot see into his heart and know that is his only goal but that is what his efforts have looked like to me.

I seriously doubt that.

Drew is as partisan as partisan gets as far as I can tell. He doesn't couch it the way you just did, acknowledging that both choices suck. It always seems to be Hillary bad, Trump not bad (except for before the primaries were settled and other, non-Trump conservatives still had a chance).

He does a very good job of hiding behind vagaries, though. It's a shell game to pin him down on anything, because he'd rather sit back and take passive-aggressive pot shots. Only, he ultimately pins himself down because his pot shots are always super pro whoever the conservative darling of the month is and anti whoever the liberal demon of the month is.

Not sure if you're serious or not, but I'm going to go ahead and ask that question every time he defends trump and demonizes Hillary at every opportunity. As someone who despises both Trump and Hillary, I'm not going to let him go never trump, then silently slink off and vote for Trump anyway, which is what his actions scream, in spite of other claims, to anyone who is paying attention.

Maybe he's playing some sort of mental contortionist game, where he won't personally vote for trump, but will do everything in his power to make sure to maximize the number of people who do and minimize the number of people who vote for Hillary as if that's any different.

I think you are being a bit unfair here. This is a very slanted forum. I can see the value in making sure the crappy stuff from both sides is being shed light on.

Plenty of people are trashing Trump only in here already. So if all Drew wants to do is inject some balance and remind us that both options are shitty, that is not anything like endorsing Trump or working for a Trump win.

I cannot see into his heart and know that is his only goal but that is what his efforts have looked like to me.

Seriously, you don't see Drew being a total Trump supporter? This is the second lengthy article that he is posted on why Trump supporters are actually quite rational people.

You have to know that Drew loves anybody who has a chance at defeating the left. It doesn't matter who. His hate for the left is stronger force than his dislike for anything else.

This demonstration is not authorized and is in clear violation of Mall of America policy.

Those who continue to demonstrate will be subject to arrest.

Drew has always been more about reposting whatever attacks on liberals he can than developing and defending any sort of positive vision, so I wouldn't think of his attacks as any sort of endorsement of the alternatives. It's never mattered to him whether there were any alternatives he actually prefers, so far as I've seen.

Which brings up an interesting point: if it's true that the policies proposed by the Democratic Party would be more beneficial for Trump's non-rich base than Trump's (which I believe), why does he have such strong pull? My own partial, speculative answer is that there's been a cultural shift during my lifetime, which Democratic politics implicitly accepts. Anger is no longer acceptable. When Democrats talk about getting angry positively, they talk about being motivated to vote, to speak with powerful people, to volunteer. They don't sound like the sorts of things I associate with anger. Mild irritation, maybe. But the position they take on guns (that we should have fewer of them, and that the idea of being on the lookout for bad people to take forceful action against has little value) looks a lot like their position on international relations, the military, and childrearing, from the perspective of whether anger can be a positive force. I think that leaves a lot of people feeling like there's something about them which they are unable to change which used to be valued and is now viewed as a pure negative. Even worse, you can't react to someone telling you that you're too angry at all forcefully, or you make it look like they're right, no matter how absurd the original accusation. I imagine that makes a lot of people feel trapped in rhetoric rather than substance, and leaves them extremely sensitive to anything which plays into that dynamic.

Not sure if you're serious or not, but I'm going to go ahead and ask that question every time he defends trump and demonizes Hillary at every opportunity. As someone who despises both Trump and Hillary, I'm not going to let him go never trump, then silently slink off and vote for Trump anyway, which is what his actions scream, in spite of other claims, to anyone who is paying attention.

Maybe he's playing some sort of mental contortionist game, where he won't personally vote for trump, but will do everything in his power to make sure to maximize the number of people who do and minimize the number of people who vote for Hillary as if that's any different.

I think you are being a bit unfair here. This is a very slanted forum. I can see the value in making sure the crappy stuff from both sides is being shed light on.

Plenty of people are trashing Trump only in here already. So if all Drew wants to do is inject some balance and remind us that both options are shitty, that is not anything like endorsing Trump or working for a Trump win.

I cannot see into his heart and know that is his only goal but that is what his efforts have looked like to me.

Seriously, you don't see Drew being a total Trump supporter? This is the second lengthy article that he is posted on why Trump supporters are actually quite rational people.

You have to know that Drew loves anybody who has a chance at defeating the left. It doesn't matter who. His hate for the left is stronger force than his dislike for anything else.

I can't really take much credit for the prediction, as I'm pretty sure everyone else in RSP knew it would happen also.

Jeff - you're one of the people around these parts that I figured was the least likely to give Drew free rent in your head. But you also seem to have succumbed to Drew-Derangement-Syndrome. Perhaps just a touch of it, nothing at all like the terminal case Eric has - he's just relentless, like a snappy little terrier at Drew's ankle, yapping, yapping,

For starters, this is for you Eric - why does it matter? Are you suggesting that changing one's mind is an erosion of character? And if so, you really, really, really seem to want to prove to someone (you?) that you're more full of righteous character than Drew. And so he occupies the fucking penthouse in your head.

I have no idea why people even think Drew is the only guy promoting an alternative view of Trump. He's not, he's just the one that triggers the epidemic of RSP libtards suffering from DDS. Try and remember, Drew, back in 2007, was a limp-wristed liberal, a hand-wringing smug little Midwestern libtard. Hell, I used to like Trump and now I don't like him so much. But only because now he's running for president, so why aren't you pestering me?

No matter, Idaho will go Trump so I can write in whomever suits me and it'll be just as empowering.

Oh shit! That's right. Lynnette made a comment on her wacky and weird thread about Hillary that she has deemed Hillary "more competent" than Trump. So I thought about that. Competent at what? And I mean that seriously. I thought through her SecState years and her senate years, her foundation troubles, her shell game with cattle futures in the 70's and her sketchy legal career. What the hell is she competent at? And I mean it. What is now better, anywhere, in the world, because of her world class competence?

Not sure if you're serious or not, but I'm going to go ahead and ask that question every time he defends trump and demonizes Hillary at every opportunity. As someone who despises both Trump and Hillary, I'm not going to let him go never trump, then silently slink off and vote for Trump anyway, which is what his actions scream, in spite of other claims, to anyone who is paying attention.

Maybe he's playing some sort of mental contortionist game, where he won't personally vote for trump, but will do everything in his power to make sure to maximize the number of people who do and minimize the number of people who vote for Hillary as if that's any different.

I think you are being a bit unfair here. This is a very slanted forum. I can see the value in making sure the crappy stuff from both sides is being shed light on.

Plenty of people are trashing Trump only in here already. So if all Drew wants to do is inject some balance and remind us that both options are shitty, that is not anything like endorsing Trump or working for a Trump win.

I cannot see into his heart and know that is his only goal but that is what his efforts have looked like to me.

Seriously, you don't see Drew being a total Trump supporter? This is the second lengthy article that he is posted on why Trump supporters are actually quite rational people.

You have to know that Drew loves anybody who has a chance at defeating the left. It doesn't matter who. His hate for the left is stronger force than his dislike for anything else.

I can't really take much credit for the prediction, as I'm pretty sure everyone else in RSP knew it would happen also.

Jeff - you're one of the people around these parts that I figured was the least likely to give Drew free rent in your head. But you also seem to have succumbed to Drew-Derangement-Syndrome. Perhaps just a touch of it, nothing at all like the terminal case Eric has - he's just relentless, like a snappy little terrier at Drew's ankle, yapping, yapping,

For starters, this is for you Eric - why does it matter? Are you suggesting that changing one's mind is an erosion of character? And if so, you really, really, really seem to want to prove to someone (you?) that you're more full of righteous character than Drew. And so he occupies the fucking penthouse in your head.

I have no idea why people even think Drew is the only guy promoting an alternative view of Trump. He's not, he's just the one that triggers the epidemic of RSP libtards suffering from DDS. Try and remember, Drew, back in 2007, was a limp-wristed liberal, a hand-wringing smug little Midwestern libtard. Hell, I used to like Trump and now I don't like him so much. But only because now he's running for president, so why aren't you pestering me?

No matter, Idaho will go Trump so I can write in whomever suits me and it'll be just as empowering.

Oh shit! That's right. Lynnette made a comment on her wacky and weird thread about Hillary that she has deemed Hillary "more competent" than Trump. So I thought about that. Competent at what? And I mean that seriously. I thought through her SecState years and her senate years, her foundation troubles, her shell game with cattle futures in the 70's and her sketchy legal career. What the hell is she competent at? And I mean it. What is now better, anywhere, in the world, because of her world class competence?

LMK.

Because unlike you, Drew is a slippery little weasel when it comes to admitting anything. I don't care who he's for. I don't care if he changed his mind. What I do care about is exposing someone who thinks they're being clever by constantly hiding behind innuendo.

If Drew would just be straight with anyone and be willing to have a serious conversation and not just play partisan whack-a-mole, I wouldn't have a problem with him.

Thanks for the rent-free space in your head. Would have been nice if you'd cleaned it up a bit before you rented it out, though.

I control your mind.

ejmowrer wrote:

Because unlike you, Drew is a slippery little weasel when it comes to admitting anything.

Don't misinterpret my refusal to play semantic games with RSP's asshole brigade (of which you are quickly becoming a part). There are at least a couple dozen idiots here whose existence I refuse to even acknowledge no matter how often they nip at my heels. I respond to people I think are actually worth responding to.

Would you like to join the people who I have written off as "irredeemable deplorables"? Because I can do that if you like.

On late-night television, it was once understood that David Letterman was beloved by coastal liberals and Jay Leno more of a Middle American taste. But neither man was prone to delivering hectoring monologues in the style of the “Daily Show” alums who now dominate late night. Fallon’s apolitical shtick increasingly makes him an outlier among his peers, many of whom are less comics than propagandists — liberal “explanatory journalists” with laugh lines.

Some of them have better lines than others, and some joke more or hector less. But to flip from Stephen Colbert’s winsome liberalism to Seth Meyers’s class-clown liberalism to Bee’s bluestocking feminism to John Oliver’s and Trevor Noah’s lectures on American benightedness is to enter an echo chamber from which the imagination struggles to escape.

It isn’t just late-night TV. Cultural arenas and institutions that were always liberal are being prodded or dragged further to the left. Awards shows are being pushed to shed their genteel limousine liberalism and embrace the race-gender-sexual identity agenda in full. Colleges and universities are increasingly acting as indoctrinators for that same agenda, shifting their already-lefty consensus under activist pressure.

Meanwhile, institutions that were seen as outside or sideways to political debate have been enlisted in the culture war. The tabloid industry gave us the apotheosis of Caitlyn Jenner, and ESPN gave her its Arthur Ashe Award. The N.B.A., N.C.A.A. and the A.C.C. — nobody’s idea of progressive forces, usually — are acting as enforcers on behalf of gay and transgender rights. Jock culture remains relatively reactionary, but even the N.F.L. is having its Black Lives Matters moment, thanks to Colin Kaepernick.

For the left, these are clear signs of cultural gains, cultural victory. But the scale and swiftness of those victories have created two distinctive political problems for the Democratic Party.

First, within the liberal tent, they have dramatically raised expectations for just how far left our politics can move, while insulating many liberals from the harsh realities of political disagreement in a sprawling, 300-plus million person republic. Among millennials, especially, there’s a growing constituency for whom right-wing ideas are so alien or triggering, left-wing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.

Thus Clinton’s peculiar predicament. She has moved further left than any modern Democratic nominee, and absorbed the newer left’s Manichaean view of the culture war sufficiently that she finds herself dismissing almost a quarter of the electorate as “irredeemable” before her donors. Yet she still finds herself battling an insurgency on her left flank, and somewhat desperately pitching millennials on her ideological bona fides.

At the same time, outside the liberal tent, the feeling of being suffocated by the left’s cultural dominance is turning voting Republican into an act of cultural rebellion — which may be one reason the Obama years, so good for liberalism in the culture, have seen sharp G.O.P. gains at every level of the country’s government.

This spirit of political-cultural rebellion is obviously crucial to Trump’s act. As James Parker wrote in The Atlantic, he’s occupying “a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock.” (The alt-right-ish columnist Steve Sailer made the punk rock analogy as well.) Like the Sex Pistols, Parker suggests, Trump is out to “upend the culture” — but in this case it’s the culture of institutionalized political correctness and John Oliver explaining the news to you, forever.

So, you're planning on voting for Trump, then?

As he's said over and over, he's definitely not voting for Trump. And he's an honorable man.

Try and remember, Drew, back in 2007, was a limp-wristed liberal, a hand-wringing smug little Midwestern libtard.

No I wasn't. I mean, just because I was kind of an Obama supporter in 2007 doesn't mean I was a . . . whatever you just said.

Sure, I was one of the handful of people who voted for Mondale in 1984, but . . . I got over it soon after.

It's a matter of perspective. From where I have sat on the so-called "spectrum" for the last 40 years you were a hand-wringer. Which is the equivalent of becoming Grizzly Adams when viewed from the perspective of a Mondale voter. Your advancement towards the bright and shining future is noted.

Drew has always been more about reposting whatever attacks on liberals he can than developing and defending any sort of positive vision, so I wouldn't think of his attacks as any sort of endorsement of the alternatives. It's never mattered to him whether there were any alternatives he actually prefers, so far as I've seen.

Which brings up an interesting point: if it's true that the policies proposed by the Democratic Party would be more beneficial for Trump's non-rich base than Trump's (which I believe), why does he have such strong pull? My own partial, speculative answer is that there's been a cultural shift during my lifetime, which Democratic politics implicitly accepts. Anger is no longer acceptable. When Democrats talk about getting angry positively, they talk about being motivated to vote, to speak with powerful people, to volunteer. They don't sound like the sorts of things I associate with anger. Mild irritation, maybe. But the position they take on guns (that we should have fewer of them, and that the idea of being on the lookout for bad people to take forceful action against has little value) looks a lot like their position on international relations, the military, and childrearing, from the perspective of whether anger can be a positive force. I think that leaves a lot of people feeling like there's something about them which they are unable to change which used to be valued and is now viewed as a pure negative. Even worse, you can't react to someone telling you that you're too angry at all forcefully, or you make it look like they're right, no matter how absurd the original accusation. I imagine that makes a lot of people feel trapped in rhetoric rather than substance, and leaves them extremely sensitive to anything which plays into that dynamic.

Liberals caused Trump to be popular. The vocal liberals pushed too hard on political correctness and safe spaces and the middle and working class voters are tired of the frivolous squabbles over what word is now the politically correct term. That's why Trump's supporters commonly say that they support him because he says what he thinks. He's seen as not passing his words through a PC filter. I'm not conservative on social issues, but it's tiring to keep up with what is currently the correct thing to say.

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mlcarter815 wrote:

rinelk wrote:

Drew has always been more about reposting whatever attacks on liberals he can than developing and defending any sort of positive vision, so I wouldn't think of his attacks as any sort of endorsement of the alternatives. It's never mattered to him whether there were any alternatives he actually prefers, so far as I've seen.

Which brings up an interesting point: if it's true that the policies proposed by the Democratic Party would be more beneficial for Trump's non-rich base than Trump's (which I believe), why does he have such strong pull? My own partial, speculative answer is that there's been a cultural shift during my lifetime, which Democratic politics implicitly accepts. Anger is no longer acceptable. When Democrats talk about getting angry positively, they talk about being motivated to vote, to speak with powerful people, to volunteer. They don't sound like the sorts of things I associate with anger. Mild irritation, maybe. But the position they take on guns (that we should have fewer of them, and that the idea of being on the lookout for bad people to take forceful action against has little value) looks a lot like their position on international relations, the military, and childrearing, from the perspective of whether anger can be a positive force. I think that leaves a lot of people feeling like there's something about them which they are unable to change which used to be valued and is now viewed as a pure negative. Even worse, you can't react to someone telling you that you're too angry at all forcefully, or you make it look like they're right, no matter how absurd the original accusation. I imagine that makes a lot of people feel trapped in rhetoric rather than substance, and leaves them extremely sensitive to anything which plays into that dynamic.

Liberals caused Trump to be popular. The vocal liberals pushed too hard on political correctness and safe spaces and the middle and working class voters are tired of the frivolous squabbles over what word is now the politically correct term. That's why Trumps supporters commonly say that they support him because he says what he thinks. He's seen as not passing his words through a PC filter. I'm not conservative on social issues, but it's tiring to keep up with what is currently the correct thing to say.

That's at least partly bullshit. How many safe spaces do you think the median Trump voter has ever been in? I've been in places which were designated as welcoming spaces for Native Americans, Russians, Asians, and GLBT folks. The only one of those which didn't require a special trip was the last, and it was just a few professors' offices. In the normal run of life, even on college campuses (which I left only about a decade ago), they're not common.

And who cares, anyway? What's so bad about someone saying to you that "Chinamen" is not the preferred nomenclature? Why do people care more about that than tax policy? If you get tired keeping up with the correct thing to say, but you're saying things which are genuinely supportive, have you ever actually gotten shit for that? I never have, so I don't see the problem. And, even if I had gotten shit, I don't get why it would be such a rage-inducing experience that I'd consider voting for Trump. This explanation seems to suggest that middle- and lower-class Americans are absurdly thin-skinned about a little criticism of their language, but not really that fussed about questions like whether they'll have help getting health care or how well-resourced their kids' schools will be.

So, on a superficial level, that explanation (which I've heard a lot) doesn't make any sense to me. It's like the bit about how liberals are arrogant. So what? A little condescension is so awful you'd vote for a guy who thinks our government does too little to suppress press freedoms? That seems silly. But I obviously don't fully understand the situation, so if someone thinks I'm giving this explanation short shrift, I'm happy to consider their reasons.